©︎ MONOCOLOR / Photo: Johannes Hucek

23rd Art Division New Face Award

Latent Space

Media performance

Marian ESSL [Austria]

Outline

Fine lines of light projected onto the domed space weave virtual spaces around the viewers. The architecture that manifests is highly fragile and constantly changes its form. The space grows, shrinks, collapses, fluctuates like a thin veil, and is dispersed as fine particles. The quiet sound continuously flows in the space as if it were sucked into it. Slowly morphing structures and soundscapes float around the dome, enveloping the observers. The virtual realm is transposed into the physical space of the dome as a structure of light to unmask the boundlessness of digital space. The work tests and investigates the spatial effects of the fulldome, which serves as a metaphor for the virtual net that always surrounds us.

Reason for Award

The sense of immersion that this work conveys to the viewer, through its meticulous survey of the dome’s real space, is due not only to the precision of its projected forms themselves. Instead, it results from the work’s facilitation of an experience that seems to foster illusions in human spatial perception, with its live-generated audio-visuals. Advances in software development have even made creative programming feasible without coding, offering greatly expanded possibilities in three-dimensional expression. Seemingly constructed of geometric graphics that cross the line between 2D and 3D, Latent Space presents an attempt to develop deeper forms of aesthetic expression in relation to viewers’ perceptions, such as their sense of time and reality, in three dimensions. (TASAKA Hiroko)